Americans die earlier at all wealth levels, even if wealth buys more years of life in the US than in Europe

Americans at all wealth levels are more likely to die sooner than their European counterparts, with even the richest U.S. citizens living shorter lives than northern and western Europeans. That is the key finding of our new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

We also found that while the wealthiest Americans live longer than the poorest, the wealth-mortality gap in the U.S. is far more pronounced than in Europe.

We are a team of health policy researchers who study…